Arresting Hope reminds us that prisons are not only places of punishment, marginalization, and trauma, but that they can also be places of hope, blessing even, where people with difficult lived experiences can begin to compose stories full of healing, anticipation, communication, education, connection, and community. The book tells a story about women in a provincial prison in Canada, about how creative leadership fostered opportunities for transformation and hope, and about how engaging in research and writing contributed to healing.

The book includes poetry, stories, letters, interviews, fragments of conversations, reflections, memories, quotations, journal entries, creative nonfiction, and scholarly research. Out of multiple and diverse possibilities involving many people, Arresting Hope is focused on five women—a prison doctor, a prison warden, a prison recreation therapist, a prison educator, and a prison inmate—and their stories of grief, desire, and hope.

p>Ruth Elwood Martin worked as family physician in Vancouver from 1983 to 2009; she also worked part-time in the medical clinics of BC correctional centres for men and women for seventeen years. She is a Clinical Professor of the School of Population and Public Health, University British Columbia, and an Associate Faculty of the Department of Family Practice. Her experiences as a prison physician participatory health researcher during the time period of Arresting Hope changed her, such that her goal became to foster the improvement of prison health and to engage patients’ voices in the process. She co-founded the Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education, which is a group committed to encouraging and facilitating collaborative opportunities for health, education, research, service, and advocacy, to enhance the social well-being and (re)integration of individuals in custody, their families, and communities. From 2011 to 2017, she served as Chair of the Prison Health Communities of Practice Group of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. Ruth continues to live and work in Vancouver, BC.

Ruth Elwood Martin's profile page

Since writing Arresting Hope/Releasing Hope, Mo Korchinski is now a proud member of society. She graduated in 2014 from the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology with my Bachelor of Social Work degree. I work as a project manager with the project Unlocking the Gates to Health peer health mentor program at the University of British Columbia. She spends most of my spare time helping others in my community and she feels that the key to turning one's life around and keeping it moving in the right direction is to help others turn their lives around. She co-directed several documentary films, which are about individuals' release from prison, and when the prison gate is unlocked, but the doors to society are kept locked. Her passion is to take my experience of addiction and the justice system and show people that changes are needed: to get the voices of women who are still inside prison heard; and, to get policy-makers to understand that change is needed in the prison system and in the communities. She lives in Vancouver and is a proud grandmother to two beautiful granddaughters, who have taught me what unconditional love is.

Mo Korchinski's profile page